The Values and Character Dispositions of 14-16 Year Olds in the Hodge Hill Constituency

17. Perceptions of student responsibility

How responsible do you think your fellow students are?

Students overwhelmingly said that other students were not responsible for their own
progression in life at Key Stage 4. Many students also said that, by and large, other
students were not very responsible. Some talked about parents not being responsible
enough, ‘some parents don’t care. You can see it in how their kids behave’.

A question was derived directly from this key response concerning responsibility as a
character quality and used in questionnaire two.

18. National Pride and being British

What does being British mean to you? Can you have pride in being British?

One student described Britishness as drinking tea and eating certain foods and another
said that it was enjoying a good measure of sporting success. Individual students said
that shared equality and rights were British values, but a significant group of other
students said they ‘shared nothing in being British’. A few students said that traditions
were important in the British way of life, but racism was also mentioned on several
occasions as a factor of Britishness.

Many students said that they were not proud of Birmingham. Several students identified
the ghettoisation of communities as a feature of the city. However, some students did
think Birmingham was a calmer and less congested city than London. Football and fish
and chips were identified as cultural elements to be proud of in Birmingham. However,
some students commented that there was ‘nothing happening’ in the city. Many students
said that they were proud of Britain and its superior services (NHS) and others said that
they thought that it was a great nation with a good multicultural population. Several
group members though said that Britain had too many problems and that their ethnic
identity excludes them from feeling British.

The questions around the subject of pride and Britishness appeared in the following
questionnaire.

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